Cryptography/Breaking Caesar cipher

Breaking the Caesar cipher is trivial as it is vulnerable to most forms of attack. The system is so easily broken that it is often faster to perform a brute force attack to discover if this cipher is in use or not. An easy way for humans to decipher it is to examine the letter frequencies of the cipher text and see where they match those found in the underlying language.

By graphing the frequencies of letters in the ciphertext and those in the original language of the plaintext, a human can spot the value of the key but looking at the displacement of particular features of the graph. For example in the English language the frequencies of the letters Q,R,S,T have a particularly distinctive pattern.

Computers can also do this trivially by means of an auto-correlation function.